Carl Claunch wrote: > Alas, not my program. It was one of many programs distributed by Share to > 1130 users, thus it was contributed by somebody.
Interesting. Thanks for the reply. I wrote, earlier: > I don't yet know what causes a flight to terminate, well before > it gets anywhere near the moon. Maybe the idea is to try to get > a hole-in-one by picking perfect initial conditions. There were a bunch of text games called "Lunar Lander" that spun off from an original written in 1969: http://www.technologizer.com/2009/07/19/lunar-lander/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Lander_(video_game_series) This 1130 game might very well have been a port (or an attempt at a port) of one of those, I suppose, but the games I looked at a few days ago (like the Jim Storer PDP-8 one that started it all) seem to be about actually landing the LEM on the moon and controlling the burn rate of the rocket fuel during the descent, not launching something from a parking orbit around earth and seeing where you'll end up. I'm beginning to think, though, that maybe that's all this program was ever about -- launching out of orbit and seeing where you'll end up (with the option to alter your velocity along the way). Maybe that's really all there is to it. In which case, it's rather mis-named! (Or maybe it was simply never finished -- an abandoned project that was contributed "as-is".) I don't see anything in the main program about a landing phase, and it would be a very odd way to structure a program to stuff all that in the ORBIT subprogram, I would think. Not too many people would have had the kind of computer access required to actually play a game like that on such a machine back in those days (the days, indeed, of "One small step for [a] man..." ;-> ), and an intensely interactive game using the console, not even a teletype terminal, would have been even more of an "abuse" of the resources of something like an 1130. The original Jim Storer PDP-8 version from '69, in Focal, is available as source code. It's a remarkably short program: http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~storer/LunarLander/LunarLander/LunarLanderListing.jpg I have a PDP-8 simulator that runs Focal and makes a very cat-unfriendly teletype sound when it's printing. I've never run anything on it besides a Towers of Hanoi program; this would be something else to try. ;->
